A woman who said she was one of the jurors explained Friday why the jury hung on the second attempted murder charge. She declined to give her name for fear of gang retaliation.

She said some jurors felt there wasn’t evidence beyond reasonable doubt to show Bermudez was at the scene.

The jury deliberated four days.

“It was very, very hard on us and we wanted to make the right decision,” she said.

She said the jury believed a 21-year-old witness contradicted her 2005 recorded statement to detectives because the woman was scared. They chose to rely on what the witness said on a 2005 tape recording instead.

The March 4, 2005 shooting happened in the 9100 block of Rex Road.

The witness, who is the former girlfriend of one of the victims, said four men in a Jeep duped her into believing they were from Rivera 13. She took them to where her boyfriend waited with two others.

She said the three passengers got out. She saw only two of them shooting and felt something hitting her. She heard a window break.

One of the shooters didn’t get back in the Jeep. The woman was later pushed out of the vehicle and heard the attackers yell the name of a gang from unincorporated Whittier.

But during the trial, she said she couldn’t identify the Arandas, whose photos she identified that night.

Enomoto said the woman received threats from both gangs.

He argued that the Arandas and two other men were retaliating against Rivera 13 that night. Joseph Aranda was shot in the buttocks in front of his house a month earlier and a car-to-car shooting six months before took the life of a Pico Nuevo gang member and friend of the brothers.

Mercado and Bermudez are members of Rivera 13.

Defense attorneys Jonathan Roberts, who is Joseph Aranda’s attorney, said the main witness cannot be trusted because she said too many different things. He also questioned her identification of the Arandas.

He also said a note written by a detective mentioned a rear window of the Jeep was possibly shot out before the people in the vehicle got out.

This wasn’t in the witness’ 2005 recorded statement and in the police report, he added.

“We believe the victims shot first,” he said.

Enomoto said there was no physical evidence any of the victims fired back.

Ruby Gonzales started working for the company in 1991. Since then she has written about cities, school districts, crimes, cold cases, courts, the San Gabriel River, local history, anime, insects, forensics and the early days of the Internet when people still referred to it as the "information superhighway." Her current beat includes breaking news, crimes and courts for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Pasadena Star News and Whittier Daily News. When not in crime reporter mode, she frequents the remaining bookstores in the San Gabriel Valley, haunts craft stores or gets dragged to eateries by a relative who is a foodie.